


Time (Perhaps You’re Smiling Now)

by Cymbidia



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, an epilogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 08:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12955488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymbidia/pseuds/Cymbidia
Summary: Curt and Arthur have one more conversation at a retrospective concert celebrating ten years since the death of glam.





	Time (Perhaps You’re Smiling Now)

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been almost nine years since I first fell head over heels in love with Velvet Goldmine. 
> 
> Title from Time by David Bowie.

The nature of nostalgia is entombment. That is what it meant, to be looked back upon, as if the period had already been drawn.

Curt still breathed. His heart beat in his chest. He walked through the world. He was a moving corpse, the walking dead. But he was still alive. And no matter how hard the heart in his chest twisted and the restless creature in his guts roiled, he still loved to perform. He needed it to live, even. He got off the hard drugs in 81, gave up on casual sex in 82. In 83, he tried to give up smoking, but that had been harder than giving up dope, so he quit trying to quit. In much the same way, he could not manage to give up the thrill of being on stage, of having all eyes on him. It was one of three things that made him feel alive anymore.

But - that was a paradox, because nostalgia meant death. It meant resignation. It meant after-the-end, having already ended. But Curt was still alive.

There had been the reporter. Curt didn’t keep in contact with the people he’d known back when- back _when_. But Mandy had his number, and presumably the reporter had shaken her up enough for her to voluntarily call Curt. She didn’t like to think of Curt, the way Curt also avoided thinking about her. The empty space between the two of them was an exact hollow outline of Brian Slade. The dead one, at least. And the reporter, in his quest to exhume that particular exquisite corpse, had stirred Curt and Mandy so that they remembered the other for just long enough to sketch out the absence of Brian Slade. His ghost lasted for a single terse phone call, but even as Curt and Mandy doggedly tried to forget each other again, the echoes of Maxwell’s Demon would not leave Curt.

So. Nostalgia. Retrospective.

“I’ll do it.” Curt said. He had the royalties from his old records coming in that kept him afloat, and he had an occasional burnt out gig or two when his manager remembered Curt existed outside of a record catalogue of old songs to be stuck into compilation albums. Curt could probably have subsisted meagrely off memories and echoes forever, but the reporter had reminded Curt of life before his dissipating death. Curt knew he would hate a nostalgia concert celebrating the dead days of glam rock, but he said yes anyway, because despite all the grief and pain it had brought him, he still hadn’t learned to stop wanting.

 

* * *

 

The reporter was there.

“I read your article,” Curt remarked to him. There was something familiar about the man, beyond their encounter at the bar or the time they’d brushed past each other on the street or even that one night at the end of Curt’s real life, laughing and fucking and hallucinating up spaceships. Curt thought it might have been the desolate blandness that had eaten him up since he’d been that kid on the rooftop. The reporter reminded Curt of someone’s old man. Not his own, someone else’s. Safe and boring and doomed.

The reporter smiled at Curt, a soft, knowing, secretive smile. “Not my best work,” he said. He had the pin at his throat. He was dressed less terribly. He didn’t look that much like someone’s dad anymore. He didn’t look freer, but he did look younger.

“I’m surprised,” Curt said. “The exposé could have been really juicy.”

“If it ever got published,” the reporter shrugged. “At some point I realised that the same execs that owned Brian Slade still owns Tommy Stone. At some other point I realised that they also owned the newspaper that I work at. It’s better this way. Boring, but better.”

“It’s a lie,” Curt said, unaccusing.

“I’m not working for Rolling Stone, Mr Wild,” the reporter smiled wryly. “I’m not even a music reporter. I got assigned that job because my boss was feeling nostalgic and I was the only Brit in the room.”

“And you finished the job, so what brought you here?” Curt leaned back and lit a cigarette. He sucked down a lungful of smoke and was halfway through the exhale before the reporter replied.

“Can’t I just be here for the music?” The reporter had a beer in his hand, probably tepid by now, and he sipped from that. He was looking at Curt with those soft doe eyes of his.

“There’s nothing good about the music here,” Curt said, gesturing expansively at himself, the dressing rooms, the stage. “It’s dead. Dragged out of its grave.”

“There’s nothing wrong in visiting a mausoleum,” the reporter said. That soft smile was back. “Besides, I liked it. Not the best concert I’ve ever been to, but everyone here’s gained some things to say about glam rock in the years since it’s demise.”

“A eulogy,” Curt concluded.

“An epilogue,” The reporter countered. “And I liked your set. Cried three times.” He wasn’t blotchy, but his lashes were damp, so Curt supposed it might be true. Curt liked the thought of it. He hoped it was true.

“At least someone liked it,” Curt shrugged, trying to suppress the smile beginning to bloom on his face. He dropped his half smoked cigarette on the floor and ground out the fire with his heel. He contemplated the flattened thing, lying on the ground with numerous others of its kind, then turned to the reporter and let himself smile at the man the way he’d been wanting to. “Hey, you wanna hear some of my new stuff?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, smiling back.


End file.
